After getting in touch with Conn while he was in prison, Lazarte says the former attorney gave the directors his unpublished manuscript. "Over the course of time, we started to learn more about Eric and spent time talking with Eric," Lazarte says of reading the document. "It was one of the clear distinctions we had when we made 'McMillion$.' We never actually had the point of view of the main person who was responsible for pulling off the crime. So for 'The Big Conn,' it was one of the things that we felt would be very different, and one of the things that attracted us to doing another fraud-type story — we could include his point of view. There's a lot of humor in [the manuscript] like you can't read it without laughing. When you see it on screen, see the way we bring it to life, it's stranger than fiction; too much to believe."
